Originally Posted by madeinuk
None of the options there are correct - perhaps one is reasonable if the question is rethought into 'which color marble is must likely to be drawn' but absolutely not as the question was asked.

Sure "most likely" is correct, for one obvious and reasonable interpretation of the question. Taking the offered answers to a multiple choice question into account when deciding how to interpret the question seems like a reasonable expectation to me.

Copying the question in:
Quote
George has a bag of marbles. There are 9 red marbles, 4 blue marbles and 5 black marbles in the bag. What is the likelihood that George will pick a red marble out of the bag?
Note that it doesn't ask for the "probability" (technical term) it asks for the "likelihood" (colloquial term). Seems to me perfectly reasonable to interpret this as "... compared to the likelihood that he will pick a blue marble, and to the likelihood that he will pick a black marble". You have to interpret it as compared to something to make the answers make sense, and while the concepts "blue" and "black" appear in the question explicitly, the concept "not red" does not.

If "equally likely" had been one of the options, I might have agreed that it was a bad question (but I'd still expect most students to get it right). Given that it wasn't, I really think a student who gets this wrong deserves to lose a mark.

Was anyone's child confused by this to the extent that they couldn't give the correct answer, really, honestly?



Quote
BTW, please tell me if I am wrong about the chances of it being red versus non-red being even.

You're correct there of course.

Email: my username, followed by 2, at google's mail